Cross-platform development is the practice of developing software products or services for multiple platforms or software environments. Engineers and developers use different methods to account for different operating systems or environments for a single application or product.
Typically, when creating a native app, you’ll need to create a separate app for Android and a separate app for iOS/Apple, each with that specific platform language. For example, if you want to build for the following platforms, you must use the default language they recognize:
- Apple iOS: Programming in Objective C or Swift
- Android: Programming in Java
- Windows Phone: Program in C# and XAML
As a business professional with no knowledge of web development, you might understand the necessity of cross-platform software for your digital products, however, if you feel you don’t need it, let’s intimate you on the reason you need to take up our cross-platform development services immediately.
Why You Need Our Cross Platform Development Services?
Letting your customers access your products and services across multiple platforms is a big plus for your business. While it would put heat on your competition and set you out as a market leader, it strengthens your brand, and helps increase your ROI on advertising and brand awareness.
Our team of experts understands the importance of cross-platform software integration and can help you achieve it for your business and brand. We will conduct a series of research regarding each platform and give you a quality report detailing the result of our findings and how it can help boost your business visibility and profits.
If you’re sure that this service is suitable for your business, you can book a free consultation session with our team. However, if you’re not convinced about the importance of our cross-platform development services to your business, keep reading to get a hang of this service and the possibilities it makes accessible for your business.
What Does Cross Platform Development Do?
Cross-platform development gives the flexibility to build your app using a universal language like Javascript, which can then be exported to various smartphone platforms. This allows an “app” to work in several living spaces. This can be done in two ways:
- Native App – Cross-Platform Development: With tools like React Native, Xamarin, or NativeScript you get an app that still uses native APIs that enable excellent performance on all platforms without having to code them all individually. This results in a very nice app that works well and is a huge compromise in terms of time and cost of creating a native app.
- Hybrid Apps – Cross-Platform Development: Hybrid development is a level below native cross-platform development. It is based on an integrated web browser and HTML 5, CSS, and Javascript to render the app. The app is encrypted and then displayed on the smartphone in an app container that is controlled by an internal web browser. In hybrid apps, developers program with native web languages but wrap them in a native wrapper for each operating system so that it can be used on multiple platforms. This can work well for simple apps, but performance can be an issue for more complex apps.
Cross-Platform Development Services
React Native
React Native is an open-source tool developed by Facebook for cross-platform application development.
The functionality that sets React Native apart is that apps that are integrated into this platform, although they are cross-platform, have the appearance of a native application and thus offer an interactive user experience.
It is an emerging framework that enables rapid prototyping and offers high initial speed. Plus, if you’re talented at JS, it’s easy to learn the basics and get started. It sounds incredible, but the codes in JavaScript use a lot of memory for computationally intensive tasks. It’s a brilliant choice for agile development and is proving to be more effective in many cases.
Services:
- Makes your app accessible more quickly in app stores
- Modular and intuitive architecture with advanced web technologies
- Community driven, so, much support
PhoneGap
PhoneGap is a free cross-platform app development tool. It provides a FOSS environment that enables cross-platform development of mobile applications and is developed by the team behind Apache Cordova.
It consists of a compiler, debugger, and some tools for testing purposes. The main web technologies included are HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. PhoneGap has the backup of a variety of plug-ins, such as Accelerometer, camera, sound, etc.
PhoneGap also supports in-app purchases for the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. It’s an incredible tool for designers who have experience with front-end technologies. Third-party cache and graphics accelerator support can speed up the application.
Features:
- A solid backend that will help beginners
- Open source so easy to share
- Extremely flexible for developers
Appcelerator
Appcelerator is another cross-platform development tool that can be used to develop, deploy and test the functionality of a mobile application. It uses JavaScript as a universal code mechanism.
This means that the same code can be used to create applications for different platforms such as iOS, Android, and Blackberry. It is the best choice for quick app development with an experienced developer in JavaScript.
Together with Arrow DB, Appcelerator offers a schema-less database with which you can provide data models without any installation effort. It even offers out-of-the-box integration with Salesforce, MS Azure, MongoDB, MS SQL, and Box. The newer version takes care of the earlier problems with speed and delay.
Features:
- Titanium framework makes it inexpensive
- Cloud services for packaging, distribution, and research
- The basic source code is available to the user at any time
Flutter
Flutter means faster and dynamic mobile app development. The hot reload works by placing source code files in a Dart Virtual Machine (DVM). The Flutter makes it easy to automatically rebuild a widget structure by showing the effects of your changes. The widget offers functions such as symbols, scrolling, navigation, fonts, etc. to start a full-fledged iOS and Android app.
Flutter is more of a responsive framework with out-of-the-box two-dimensional rendering, widgets, and tools. All of these elements help you design, build, test, and debug apps with ease.
Features:
- Productive because developers can build iOS and Android from a single code base
- High customization options with a rich material design
- Create branded designs with OEM widgets
Cordova
Cordova allows you to code a hybrid application that is then ported to different operating systems. It is not a language per se, but rather a mobile development framework.
This framework helps you develop applications for different platforms like Android, Firefox OS, iOS, Ubuntu, and Windows 8. You don’t need to speak the native language of iOS or Android as Cordova works with different web languages: HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.
The Cordova framework is the foundation for hybrid applications, such as those encoded with Angular and Ionic languages. Because of this, you will come across this term often in many situations.
Some applications developed with Cordova are Walmart and Adobe. There is also another language, Angular, which is based in part on Cordova. It develops the client part with TypeScript, a variant of JavaScript developed by Microsoft.
Felgo
Felgo is an easy-to-use cross-platform development SDK that works on the Qt framework. Qt, a famous C++ structure, is widely used by developers. It expands this Qt core with an app and game elements. Analysis tools, plugins for in-app purchases, etc. make it a stand-alone platform.
Felgo is one of those growing cross-platform tools for developing mobile apps. It’s very popular with the new generation of developers these days. The feature that makes it attractive is that if you do not make a profit on your business, they will not charge you anything.
Felgo keeps the attention of modern developers as they can save 90% of the coding with Felgo compared to Xamarin and ReactNative. It is well on the way to providing a safe, time-saving, and beginner-friendly platform with full support.
Services:
- Faster and more impressive native cross-platform apps with great user interfaces
- Build a powerful embedded system app using C ++ and JavaScript
- Develop games faster with an in-game level editor, multiplayer, and Felgo cloud services
- Perform live code reloads all in one, reloads per second from Windows, Linux, and Mac
Ionic
Ionic Mobile App Development Framework uses HTML5 to create hybrid apps. Hybrid apps are better than pure native apps when it comes to support, speed, and third-party access. This is the best option when you are short on time to market your app.
Native-style UI components and layouts that you can use on iOS and Android. However, since it’s an HTML5 framework, it needs a wrapper like Cordova or PhoneGap to work as a native app.
Features:
- Stencil – a web component compiler that helps create standards-compliant web designs
- Capacitor – a layer, also called a cross-platform API, that lets you call native SDKs from web code.
- Lazy Loading – comes with Ionic 4 and allows you to speed up app loading time and performance by breaking them up into packages.
Sencha
Sencha is similar in functionality to React Native. The critical factor that differentiates the two is the use of the Ext JS framework for development. It offers a visual application builder for HTML5 with the reusability of user-defined components. The native application packager manages the distribution to the Apple Store and Google Play.
Because HTML5 is used for development, you can test and run your applications in both browsers and mobile applications. It is also compatible with various cross-platform tools such as Adobe PhoneGap for developing highly functional apps.
Services:
- Improves the productivity of the development team through IDE plugins
- Minimizes web app development costs
- MVC architecture to make codes readable
Benefits of cross-platform development
Cross-platform development offers several benefits including the following:
- Costs are reduced as the need to code in two or three different languages is eliminated. In addition, errors that exist in the common code base only need to be (for the most part) fixed once.
- Time to market is reduced because it takes much less time to develop one program than it does to develop two or three apps for each device platform.
- The consistency between different operating systems increases and creates a more seamless user experience.
- Companies can reach many more customers right from the start, which increases visibility and future ROI. The development tools are trusted because they use common programming languages.
- It’s ideal for prototyping as it allows for faster time-to-market on more than one platform and allows the owner to collect user feedback, get a foothold in the market, and, if necessary, acquire patents before another company does the same.
- In the case of apps used by employees, cross-platform apps can help you get faster deployment and adoption at a lower cost as Bringing Your Own Device (BYOD) guidelines become more common.
Why You Need Our Cross Platform Development Services?
Cross-platform development services make it possible to create applications that stand out on the market through the efficient use of resources. Choosing the right cross-platform development service is important to ensure the success of your project because it will save you money.
Our team of engineers is experienced in building cross-platform software and a lot more. They take away the long and tedious process of ideation setting into play the updated strategies. Indeed, your business will thrive as you will reach more people eliminating the need for retargeting that doesn’t always convert.
So, just book a free consultation session with our team so we can help you create a structure that will put your business across multiple platforms easily.
